skirmish 25 Feb

The ancient world has been a popular backdrop for strategy games for a long time. Canadian indie developer Longbow Games is no stranger to the genre with their release of Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar, the sequel to the company’s first game in the series, Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece. Hegemony Rome takes gamers to the wild forests of ancient Gaul where you will follow Gaius Julius Caesar in his quest to conquer the Gallic tribes.

Purely dedicated to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, the game features a detailed interactive map of the entirety of Gaul, stretching from the Mediterranean coast in the south, to the present-day English Channel and part of the southern coast of the British Isles.

Hegemony Rome will feature two modes: A scripted story Campaign broken down into four chapters following Caesar and a sandbox mode where players will be able to choose from roughly 25 factions in Gaul and conquer at will.

Unlike the turn-based model of other RTS games such as the Total War series, the overall gameplay happens in real time, from managing cities and recruiting troops to marching and fighting battles, making this game a relatively fast-paced and dynamic experience. The game also provides different main and secondary missions throughout the campaign, which adds some light RPG elements.

There is no delineation between strategic and battlefield modes. Utilizing the series’ trademark zooming feature, players are able to direct forces by scrolling out into a 2D strategic map with chess-like figures representing towns and armies and quickly zoom into to an active 3D battlefield in real-time.

Battles happen pretty frequently to our great delight. However, Hegemony Rome focuses more on the strategic and tactical elements of war. For instance, players must factor in changing seasons and availability of supplies before marching off into enemy territory to fight. This forces players to plan how and when to fight rather than blindly looking for one for the sake of fighting, which is a welcome feature for those more strategically and historically oriented.

Though battles are a central element to the game, Hegemony Rome complements this feature by also emphasizing on the logistical side of fighting wars and building an empire, ensuring  supply lines are created between towns and forts so that your armies as well as the general population are properly fed to maintain morale.

In order to keep your war machine well-supplied, you will need to balance between recruiting workers and military units from a limited pool of manpower in each region. There will be the need to actively gather resources such as wood and iron in order to upgrade towns and cities, build new outposts, siege engines, as well as bridges in order to solidify control of conquered areas and prevent your supply lines from being raided and cut off by barbarian raiders.

It goes without saying that we look forward with great anticipation to playing the finished product and spending many hours for the glory of Rome. An early build of the game is available right now on Steam Early Access.

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Title: Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar

Developer: Longbow Games

Publisher: Kasedo Games

Release Date: TBA

Platform: PC